Leopard on a Dell Mini 9: Your Mama could do this.

The po’ boy’s Macbook Air

Update: This machine is now available on ebay.

It took Dell nearly a month to get it to me, but that’s hardly a surprise; by all accounts, these little things are selling like hotcakes. Small wonder. The Mini 9 runs Leopard easily, and when you consider that it has about eighty percent of the grunt of a MacBook Air at less than a fifth the price, it’s damned hard to pass up. I pulled the trigger on this one on Black Friday when they were $50 off, putting the base price at less that $299. Upgrades on hard drives were discounted, too, so I gave my savings back in exchange for a 32gb SSD, opted out of the extra RAM, bluetooth, webcam, extended support (where we’re going, we don’t get no support), and all the other junk they peddle and managed to skid into the checkout well under the four hundred dollar mark. Even after I gave Crucial $29 for a 2GB RAM upgrade, my total outlay looked miniscule compared to the $2300 an SSD-equipped MacBook Air will set you back.

In fairness, the Air’s 128GB SSD dwarfs my 32GB, and while both machines have 1.6Ghz Intel processor-izors, the MacBook has a zippy Core 2 Duo while I have only the lowly Atom. Still, I’m happy to overlook those shortcomings in light of the fact that I can afford both a Mini 9 and my next semester of college.

Enough with the yammering.

Folks over at http://mydellmini.com/forums have worked out most all the kinks in getting Leopard onto the Mini. There are several methods floating around but one maintained and partially developed by a user named Type11 is the preferred one. It creates a proper Mac-style EFI partition that permits installing OS X updates and Time Machine backups. The method is in active development, and you may want to use the more stable version stickied in the forum instead of the versions still in beta.

Caveats

The Mini won’t sleep with the OEM drive. I decided that I could live without sleep functionality if it saved some bucks, and the machine boots so quickly that I hardly miss it. As I write this there is news that the OEM drive can be set up to sleep correctly, but for now if you have to have a Mini that sleeps you’ll need an aftermarket RunCore SSD.

The first thing to do is to get yourself a copy of the Linux bootstrapper made especially the Mini 9. I’ll skip the intricate step-by-step, because the version on the forums is kept up to date. While this list looks a little daunting (the forum version a little more so), I was struck by how easy this really was. It was really no harder than a Windows installation, circa 1999 or so. The short version is thus:

1. Plug in whatever external DVD drive you’ve got laying around.
2. Boot the Linux CD to the boot: prompt.
3. Swap for your retail Leopard DVD (Steal Leopard and face the wrath of Jobs) and boot the OS X installer.
4. Format the Mini’s internal drive to one GUID partition.
5. Install Leopard (don’t forget to customize the installation to skip extraneous languages and printer drivers).
6. The install will fail. Don’t freak. Reboot with the Linux CD and point it to the internal disk.
7. Leopard should boot. Run software update and get all the latest an’ greatest.
8. Reboot with the Linux CD again.
9. Mount the .dmg that’s on the Linux CD. Run the scripts therein.
10. Reboot again and commence screwing around with the MacBook Nano Apple won’t make.

After running Monolingual and Trimmit, I disabled sleep and nuked the hibernate image with a visit to the terminal:

In fact, so far as I recall, that was my only trip to the terminal during the install. The installer scripts really cup your balls, so to speak. After everything shook out, I ended up with about 22GB free, which was plenty for my purposes. A normal set of work files for me is around a gig, which left plenty of room for a few hours of Dylan, Tom Waits and Mingus and a local copy of my iDisk.

Now, how to type on it?

Next on my list was to deal with the ridiculous keyboard layout. A lot of really bad things have been done to the keyboard to cram it under a 9 inch screen; the tab and caps lock keys are barely more than three-eighths of an inch wide; the function keys have been buried in the center row of keys and require a Fn modifier key to access. The Command & Option (Windows & Alt) keys are swapped around and the quote key is down next to the spacebar. There’s not a thing to to about the laughably narrow keys or function keys, but some rearrangement is possible for the others.

A freeware app called Ukelele(sic) does a quite workable job of swapping the keys on the software side. I moved the command, option, quote and semicolon keys and installed the .keylayout file in the /Library/Keyboard Layouts folder. It appeared in the International pane of System Preferences right off, but I had to run a permissions repair to get it working. YMMV. Disk Utility didn’t modify the permissions on my .keylayout file, but it began working immediately afterwards the repair process. I’ve made made my keymap available in case anyone can make use of it: [download id="1"]

I then turned to swapping the keycaps. Someone who’s not such a picky asshole could have just lived with the few small discrepancies between what was printed on the keys and what they key actually did, but, well, I’m a picky asshole. I couldn’t find any info on removing keys online, so I just pried one up with my fingernail and weaseled a long skinny screwdriver under it. With a slight twist the little plastic scissor dammit let go, and I was swapping away. It took less than five minutes to rearrange the keys to match the new software layout.

The trackpad hardware is capable of two-finger scroll. I used another method from the forums and noodled around with settings in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.driver.ApplePS2Trackpad.plist, but didn’t really have much luck. It works, pretty much, except you have to press so hard that it’s not worth the trouble, and even then it only seems to work intermittently. Some in the forums claim to have got it working okay, others bitch about the same problems I found. I ended up leaving the settings somewhere in the middle, where you can kinda-sorta scroll by rolling your fingertips instead of dragging them. After a while I just plugged in my Logitech VX Nano to be done with it.

Living, uh, mini.

I have no idea why Dell shipped these machines with such a masochistic key arrangement, but after making just these few improvements, I’ve been surprised at how well I can type on this miniscule keyboard. The Mini runs Photoshop well enough to accomplish anything you’d want to do on a screen this tiny. Front Row works, Spaces and Expose are smooth and Time Machine has been making regular backups to my Time Capsule. All in all, it’s a completely functional micro-computer. It’s completely solid state (except for the keys), dead silent, and the battery has been lasting about three hours. Closer to four in WriteRoom. Oh and it weighs half a pound less than a MacBook Air. Take that, mapple.